Generally speaking, legal case management or matter management refers to a category of law practice management techniques used by law firms, corporate clients, and courts to leverage knowledge and methodologies for managing the life cycle of a case or matter more effectively. In some instances, matter management is distinguished from case management in that case management may refer to law firm related activities (“cases”) while matter management may refer to activities involved in managing all aspects of the corporate legal practice (“matters”). Throughout this document, the terms “case management” and “matter management” may be used interchangeably and considered as applicable to a range of different industries (e.g., legal industry, insurance industry, manufacturing industry, etc.). Similarly, the terms “case” and “matter” may be used interchangeably and considered as applicable to any types of organized collection of related information.
Corporations may use matter management software and systems to manage both in-house counsel staffs as well as outside counsel law firms and non-law firm legal service providers (e.g., expert witnesses, court reporters, copy services, etc.) who work on legal matters on behalf of the corporations. This management includes tracking such items as lists of attorneys and other workers assigned the case, types of legal work, pending and resolved issues, documents, budgets, invoices, etc.
As attorneys and law firms compete for clients, they are routinely challenged to deliver services at lower costs with greater efficiency, thus firms develop practice-specific processes and use contemporary technologies to assist in meeting such challenges. Law firms may use matter management software and systems to track time keeping and billing, accurate opening of matters, deadlines and dockets, litigation support (e.g., witnesses, judges, courts, opposing counsels, etc.), conflicts and ethics control, research, communication and collaboration, data mining and modeling, as well as data security, storage, and archive accessibility among many other activities. While such processes and technologies may be customized, they need to be compatible with requirements of various corporate clients and court practices.
As these systems entail the processing and storage of confidential corporate information (e.g., financial data, claims information, privileged legal matter data, etc.), needs exist in the deployment of these systems to provide data security such as capability to handle ethical walls, installation behind corporate security and firewalls in addition to be hosted as Internet-based ASP application, conformance to regulatory requirements (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) security and audit compliance mandates), etc.